Missouri’s Marcus Denmon has been overcoming adversity all his life
By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
COLUMBIA | Marcus Denmon can tell the difference between gunshots, even in a church, and even during his cousin’s funeral. You could too if you lived his childhood, and its why he stayed calm while grieving women screamed and even his Missouri basketball coaches ducked under pews.
This is the first time he’s talked about any of this, at least publicly. He sat in the front row that day last month, a pallbearer for a cousin killed in cold blood, when more than 70 gunshots rocked the Macedonia Baptist Church at 25th and Benton in Kansas City.
Denmon immediately recognized the shots coming from outside, knew the blasts weren’t getting closer, but not everyone grew up like him so chaos engulfed the church.
Children wailed tears. One woman jumped out a window, and a man in a suit bumped the casket containing the cousin Marcus called a brother and considered a best friend.
The box started to rock, and Marcus leaped up to steady it. All around him, 400 mourners turned into mayhem, the last respects for his beloved cousin turned into a crime scene. Anger bubbled inside.
He thinks about payback, because who wouldn’t? He’d rather whoever did this die than go to jail, he means this literally, and the pain he feels now is worsened by the isolation of being two hours from the people he loves most.
“I’m not a person that gets close to people that often,” he says. “Besides my teammates, I don’t love nobody but my family. When you’re gone for so long, you just want to be around people you love.”
Marcus Denmon thinks he’s tougher than you, and more specifically, he has to be tougher than you. This defines how Marcus plays basketball, and makes him a perfect fit for coach Mike Anderson’s Missouri Tigers.
“Not all kids have that,” MU assistant Matt Zimmerman says.
Jacob Pullen is Kansas State’s preseason All-American, and KU’s Josh Selby might be a one-and-done lottery pick, but it’s the 6-foot-3 guard from Hogan Prep who would be Big 12 Player of the Year at this point. Denmon is a self-made star now, a chance to be Kansas City’s most successful college basketball player since Brandon Rush or maybe even Wayne Simien.
He is the leading scorer for the nation’s No. 10 team and one of college basketball’s most efficient players, averaging more than 17 points in fewer than 30 minutes, and hitting 50 percent of his threes and 85 percent of his free throws.
He has more than twice as many assists as turnovers, and 246 points on just 164 shots. In one four-game stretch, he scored 79 points on just 38 shots.
Teammate Michael Dixon says Chris Paul is the only player he’s gone against who’s more competitive than Dixon, and Anderson will gush about Denmon’s hard work and leadership. But mostly, Denmon wants to be known as tough.
It makes him sick that so many Kansas City kids seem to transfer, for instance, and the pride comes out when he talks not only of sticking at Mizzou but playing through a fracture under his kneecap that required surgery and that would’ve kept most in street clothes.
Denmon was MU’s second-leading scorer last season, and when he got the award for the team’s sixth man of the year, told the banquet audience he didn’t want to win it again. Already, and in a program built to have interchangeable parts, Denmon is the Tigers’ most indispensable player.
He led a furious comeback with 27 points in an eventual loss to Georgetown, saved the Oregon game with 19 points on seven shots, made an essential steal down the stretch in an overtime win over Vanderbilt, and the game’s biggest play with a long outlet pass to Laurence Bowers against Illinois.
Denmon is a boy grown to a man, any mark about bad grades forcing a transfer from Lincoln Prep after his sophomore year now washed away by making Academic All-Big 12 last season.
He is the hardest working player on a team full of them, never done at practice until he’s made at least a few hundred extra shots, finally showing the college basketball world what he’s capable of with two healthy knees and an overflowing confidence.
“Every shot I take in a game I’ve taken that shot thousands of times,” he says.
“Sometimes he just won’t be denied,” Anderson says. “He’s just growing in front of our eyes.”
• • •
Marcus was four or five the first time someone he loved got shot, and just a year older the first time someone he knew got killed.
He says things like “bullets don’t have eyes,” and “where I’m from people come and go,” lessons embedded in him since grade school. His grandmother, Bertha, became something like a neighborhood mother, caring for five children of her own plus at least nine others she thought to be in danger.
Most of the people Marcus loves make up this inner circle, many of them marked by the same “FBL” tattoo he has on his right forearm. It stands for “Family By Love,” and the men in this fraternity might not all be technically related but call each other “cousin” and “brother.”
Marion Denmon had that tattoo. He was Marcus’ cousin, known as “Little Daddy,” and they were mostly inseparable growing up.
“You saw him, you saw me,” Marcus says. “That’s how it was.”
Marcus thinks about Marion every day. Sometime he cries, sometimes he sits with nothing but his thoughts. Marion was a good kid who sometimes made the wrong decisions, Marcus says, drawn to the streets in a way that tempted trouble.
Long before this month, Marcus worried that his being in Columbia instead of Kansas City left Little Daddy pulled in by bad choices.
Marcus felt like a calming force, and didn’t like to think about what might happen when he was away.
People ask Marcus all the time now if he’s OK, if he needs to talk about things, and he usually fibs and says everything’s fine.
Everything’s not fine, of course, but he has a lot of practice coping with loss.
Five friends grew up in Kansas City’s urban core, each with those FBL tattoos. Two are in jail. One just died from a gunshot.
“Me and Marcus look at it like God must have a plan for us,” says Justin Henderson, a junior at Central Missouri. “We’re the only ones still around.”
• • •
Marcus has been having these dreams lately. They started a year or so ago, way before Marion’s death, crazy dreams, all the time, every time he goes to sleep, stuff he can’t explain.
The other night, after the Northern Illinois game, he dreamed about meeting a guy he beat up back in the eighth grade. Only it wasn’t really that guy, just his body and name, with someone else’s face. Some ugly dude.
Anyway, Marcus told the guy they didn’t have problems any more, that was a long time ago, middle school, and they’re grown now but the ugly guy was ticked.
Then some girl ran into the room and started shooting. Little Daddy was there. He got shot. They all got shot. Only in the dream, it didn’t hurt.
“He’s been in my dreams a lot lately,” Marcus says. “Some is good and funny. Some is bad and terrible, like, ‘Why am I having these crazy thoughts?’”
• • •
Back at the church, the middle of chaos, and all Marcus could do was wait.
He remembers being furious. Sad. Frustrated. He heard something like this might happen, but you hear a lot of things when emotions are involved.
The gunshots, to him at least, clearly sounded more like disrespect than danger, someone trying to make a point more than another obituary, but it took a good 45 minutes for the mourners to calm down enough to properly let out. At least one of the limos outside had a bullet hole.
“I just wanted the service to be ended right,” Marcus says. “I just wanted to get my little bro in the ground.”
Around 400 people attended the funeral, but after the shots, only 50 or so made it to the repast. Just the people who loved Marion most, Marcus says.
He believes in God, even now, that this must be in His plan. He also believes in consequences, real consequences, the kind given out by a higher power and not the police.
Sometimes, Marcus thinks about seeing that revenge for himself.
But by now, he has too much at stake.
“I’m going to be successful,” he says. “And the people that’s at home doing the dumb, petty stuff like shooting in the air at a funeral, they’re going to still be broke with no money and be bums and just still be at home. I’m doing something. I’m going to be successful. So, why? Why get into that? Even if I want to, why?
“I’m smarter than that.”
|
** Official Mizzou Basketball Repository Thread **
(https://chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=236599)